The cottage, and a bright red chair

For me, the weekend starts on Ontario's Highway 11, just north of Gravenhurst, where the road winds past a cluster of majestic and craggy cliffs fuzzy with pine trees that soar up from a roadside gorge and barely tolerate the passing cars. One look at that rock face, and deadlines, e-mails and other work pressures cease to exist.

Our place on Penn Lake isn't fancy. There's no phone. Internet access is sketchy at best and a bit of a hassle. But the cottage is right on the lake; if you're not listening to waves crashing on the dock, you're hearing loons, cardinals, or black-capped chickadees; or, later in the day, the call of a neighbour announcing the location of the evening's happy hour.

What really takes over for me up there, so removed from the city, is the smack-in-the-face reality that there's also this. And that, aside from loved ones, this, rather than sales numbers or reviews or what e-readers will do to the future of books, is what life is all about.

Can you think of a more perfect place to sit with a good book?

Up in Huntsville, I don't read for work. I read for myself. So the books I choose tend to bristle with characters I can't look away from. I might like them, I might hate them. Either way, I care enough to take them to my favourite place and share my bright red Muskoka chair with them.

Recent choices have been Elizabeth Strout's Amy and Isabelle, a story about the coming-of-age of both a daughter and a mother; as well as her Pulitzer Prize-winner, Olive Kitteridge. It was on Penn Lake that I first read Anne Tyler's Breathing Lessons, as well as John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces - two more Pulitzer picks. Only the best for my Muskoka. I spent an entire day last month reading a pre-publication copy of Marcy Dermansky's Bad Marie because I couldn't put it down. Here was a terrific example of a despicable character drawn so well the reader could not help but root for her. I read this one with my mouth open. Look for it in late June.

Although I usually try to write a bit every day, when I'm up north I don't rush my mornings to get to work. The water, the rocks, the trees, the excitement of a bear sighting down the road: these things demand that you slow down, and I do just that. I turn off the Blackberry, pour another cup of Muskoka Roastery coffee and laze around as long as I want with a great book.

Tish Cohen is the author of the novels Town House and Inside Out Girl.